Will Galaxy S6 Tempt iPhone Owners? Probably Not

If you had a flagship Samsung Galaxy S5, you could do things an iPhone owner couldn't.

You could swap batteries out, increase the storage with a micro SD card, drop it on the floor and watch it bounce rather than shatter thanks to its plastic casing, or accidentally drop it in the loo and see no harm done, thanks to waterproofing. It also ran Android.

The other thing it had that an iPhone did not was a giant screen.

Apple (NasdaqGS: AAPL - news) changed that last autumn, with the launch of the iPhone 6 Plus.

It worked. Spectacularly.

The company went on to sell 74.5 million iPhones – a record – in the fourth quarter of 2014.

And now Samsung has changed the first four.

Its new flagships, the S6 and the S6 Edge, take its design much closer to the iPhone.

The plastic has been swapped out for glass and metal and looked at from the headphone jack, they're almost identical.

The only difference, really: it still runs Android. Every distinctive feature of the S5 is brushed under the carpet by the S6.

This is probably what the South Korean giant should have done last year.

Instead, they've given Apple a six-month head start.

Many will have swapped to Apple's bigger screen: will these new design changes convince them to switch back? Probably not.

It is also an acknowledgement that Apple got all the big calls right with the iPhone 6.

But the S6 will keep Samsung in the high-end game.

Many thought that, for a premium phone, the S5 felt a bit plasticky and cheap.

Samsung overestimated demand for the S5 by 40% and its profits dropped by 32% in 2014.

The S6 is an attempt to write off 2014 and start afresh. Those on a two year phone replacement cycle, or buying a new phone, will see a lot more quality.

And the S6 Edge at least offers something different in design, even if I’m not sure entirely what functionality a curved screen offers.

But the S6 looks like a quality smartphone, which is exactly what Samsung had forgotten to do last time round.